We Lead Not Follow

We Lead Not Follow

We don’t really care how many Facebook friends you have. We don’t even care how many Facebook friends we have. We love you, but we are drowning in useful information and the minutiae of your daily existence, even in the aggregate, simply aren’t as interesting as you think they are.

We like people. We like listening to people when they have something to say, something raw and powerful and intricate and beautiful and angry and sad. We’re not interested in 140 character brainfarts. We’re not actually all that concerned about what you’re doing right now.

Our gorge actually begins to rise at the idea of being interested in what Lady Gaga is doing right now.

We refuse to define ourselves by the people we friend on our social media platforms, the picocelebrities we follow on Twitter. We’re just not that into you, even if you are Our Very Good Friends. We’re trying to carve out some quiet and contemplative places in our lives and we’re going to do our best not to fill them right up again with dross.

We stand in opposition to the slicing and dicing of our thoughts into smaller and smaller quanta. We seek to set aside the Eratosthenes’ sieves of our attention spans, from which, instead of prime numbers settling to earth, it’s a hail of canonical cheese sandwiches pelting down out of the aether. We choose to leave unsatisfied the desire for an ongoing background hum that turns out to be the choral sound of our brain cells giving up the ghost.

We don’t follow orders, we don’t follow the Leader, we don’t follow you on Twitter. Follow all you want, friends, but we’re not going to follow suit.

Are we being arrogant? Shortsighted? Cantankerous? Should we get back on our porch, go back to muttering over our charmingly archaic long-form blog posts, stop shouting at the kids to get off our goddamn lawn? Probably.

But we’re not going to back down. Words have meaning. We don’t follow, we lead.